During a recent earnings call, OCZ CEO Ryan Petersen made an interesting announcement relating to the company’s solid state drives (SSD). Specifically, it concerns OCZ’s subsidiary company Indilinx which was purchased in 2011 for $32 million of OCZ common stock. According to a transcript provided by SeekingAlpha, OCZ is working on a new SSD based on the company’s Barefoot 3 controller. That controller is especially intriguing because it is reportedly being internally-developed and will use a new Aragon SSD processor which is a controller chip running at 400 Mhz with an optimized and custom RISC instruction set.

The Aragon core is further a 32-bit chip based on TSMC’s 65nm process node. It is using certain IP that is being licensed from an as-yet-unnamed third party. Allegedly, it is able to execute most instructions and branches in a single clock cycle. Bearing in mind that this is an announcement to shareholders, OCZ has stated the following about the new controller:

“When implemented in SSD controller, this gives the core a much higher performance than when using an off-the-shelf embedded safety field. And this design opens a world of new possibilities for game changing SSD solutions as it supports unprecedented levels of processing power.”

Beyond that we do not know what kind of performance to expect from the drives, but we should not have to wait too long to find out. OCZ should begin sampling the drives sometime between August and September of this year and are hoping to make them available for purchase by the holiday shopping season in Q4 2012.

It will be interesting to see where this new OCZ/Indilinx controller stands in relation to the other controller makers. Here’s hoping that it can give SandForce and Intel a run for their money and give us even more competition to drive down SSD prices for consumers!